Do you have the balls for male birth control?

By TYLER POSPISIL

Pregnancy can be a wonderful experience to share with someone, or it can be the exact opposite. You could be finically starved, overly dependent on others and barely scraping by. To the many people who are not prepared for children, I have a strong hunch that just hearing the word “pregnancy” would be scarier than most horror movies playing at the cinema. In an effort to cut down on unintentional pregnancies, a new concept has been introduced: male birth control.

A recent experiment was designed to address this new concept. Sadly, the project was dropped due to side effects. Of the 320 healthy men taking male birth control, 20 men dropped out.

The biggest push factor behind cutting the project and the men dropping out was the slight relationship between depression and the pill. Elisabeth Lloyd refers to a study of the relationship between birth control and the pill. The study had a large sample size of over one million women, and it was determined that a side effect of the pill could be depression.

However, the chances of developing it are very minimal, so it is a calculated risk. If people are aware of this risk then it should be up to them to decide what they want. And it seems that was the case, because 75 percent of the participants said that they would take this pill even with the risk of depression.

So now we ask the question: should men be expected to take the pill? I say why not? If you are a male, and understand the potential health risks, such as the one outlier oddball case of fertility not returning to normal levels and the small link for depression, then why not?

If the pill becomes readily available and becomes a staple in every pharmacy, then I believe men should be expected to take it. Women already have it hard enough. They have to carry babies around for nine whole months and eventually deliver them. As if this isn’t bad enough, taking birth control is a hassle on top of it. Women must take the pill every single day at a set time. Men should take it for that reason alone – to take the stress off women and give them one less thing to worry about.

Lastly, the most obvious reason why males should take the pill when it becomes more available is to avoid conceiving a baby. After all, that is the function the pill is designed to carry out. Safety and caution are never the wrong answers. It does not really matter if a female is on the pill as well. All that means is that you are about as safe as you can be regarding the risk of pregnancy.

I cannot say for certain that I would be part of the 75 percent that would be willing to take the pill because I was not a participating member in the test. But I would like to think after going through the testing phase that I would make my decision based on what my morals tell me to do despite having no empirical data to go off of. I believe I would happily go on the pill.